


gabriel done came to me (and kissed me in my sleep)

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Backstory, Korean Keith (Voltron), M/M, Texan Keith (Voltron)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-18
Updated: 2016-08-18
Packaged: 2018-08-09 12:20:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7801666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Dude,” Lance says, almost reverent if it wasn’t for the glee in his eyes, “How are you even real?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	gabriel done came to me (and kissed me in my sleep)

Keith moves from Wimberley to Archer City to Pecos, Pecos to Fredericksburg to Poteet. He builds a motorbike when he’s sixteen out of the discarded guts outside the gas station he works the summer through at in Wichita Falls, humming _hold my hand, baby, hold my hand, it’s a long way down to the bottom of the river -_

Grow up in small town Texas long enough, and you’ll have learnt the song, you’ll have learnt every last goddamn score by rote. His hair’s on fire and his heart is burning, but the Lord never comes for his first-born son; he leaves Keith to make his own way out. He leaves, but the dust still sticks to his hands, his mouth still tastes like cantaloupe in summer, and he can’t get the Shakespeare he heard back in Round Top out of his bones. _We make guilty of our disasters the sun, moon and stars_ : Keith is not the first angry boy to overreach. He’s a Southern boy who knows his scripture, after all; the family in Luckenbach had seen to that. He’s a Southern boy and the dying summer heat plasters his shirt to his skin like the last slow burning of Icarus.

When he gets to Arizona, he spends three nights in Phoenix, telling himself he’s not scared of the future, sitting on the step outside his crappy motel room, leaning up against the vending machine. He misses the swing on the porch of the house in Fredericksburg on nights like this, staring out at the stars above the car park.

For all his wandering, this is the furthest out of Texas state Keith has ever been. The stars are the same, though, and that gives him the last scrap of bravery he’s needing. He checks out in the middle of the night before he loses his nerve, and heads off to the Garrison at dawn. Something in his chest goes quiet there, in the early morning desert, something that’s been yowling on in his chest for near on eighteen years.

He wonders if maybe this is home.

*

“Wait,” Lance asks him, “Are you seriously saying you lived in a place called Rainbow?”

“Sure did,” Keith says, without looking up from his meal.

“That’s super gay, buddy.”

“Not really.”

“But you told me you lived in Possum Kingdom last week!”

Keith remembers the Dallas boy with the laughing eyes, the way he’d dragged his shirt up over his head, slowly, teasingly, how he rolled his hips in Keith’s lap. He’d had worse years.  

“Lived there too. Lake was nice.”

Keith really wants a cigarette, but there’s nothing like being transported through a wormhole onto an Altean ship with no tobacco and a disapproving Shiro in close quarters to get a habit licked. He also really wants Lance to stop looking at him like if he cuts his words the right way, a lie will fall out at his feet; or even worse, Keith’s whole life story.

Keith isn’t getting shit he wants today, it seems.

“I thought you went to a strawberry festival one year,” Pidge says absently, sitting upside-down on a couch with their legs hooked over the back, their back on the cushion and their head dangling. The whole thing looks so uncomfortable that Keith’s trying not to look at them too long.

“Two years running. The rodeo was alright.”

“The rodeo?!”

Lance scoots his chair closer. Keith rolls his eyes.

“Dude,” Lance says, almost reverent if it wasn’t for the glee in his eyes, “How are you even real?”

“I ask myself the same question about you every day, bless your heart,” Keith mutters, and takes another bite. Fuck, he misses the food. He misses honey barbecue sauce, chicken fried steak, all the crap he eaten every which way every which Sunday, Monday and Tuesday in the school cafeterias and in the church lunches. After you’ve eaten at Smitty’s Market, somehow Coran’s best attempts at space goo don’t quite measure up. Sure, he doesn’t miss the same people eating the food, who said the word _exotic_ like they hadn’t stolen their recipes, but -  

He’s homesick, he guesses. Huh. That’s weird. That’s a weird feeling.

“What the hell,” Lance whines, kicking his chair back onto two legs, “I didn’t even leave Cuba until I was, like, twelve, and then it was for a cousin’s wedding, which then got called off, so we all had to go home anyway, and -”

Keith zones out. Honestly, he can never decide, when he hears about Lance’s family or catches a glimpse of them in Lance’s memories during training - he can never decide if he’s jealous or not. Lance is so fiercely Cuban, so fiercely of his home, that Keith - who spent half his life on Wikipedia, trying to read up on the history of Korea in some attempt at finding resonance, and the other half in his state history class never hearing anything but the story of where he was - has always seen Lance as something odd and other to himself.

 _You’re not from Austin, are you?_ The boy from Dallas had asked, them both lying by the lake naked under the pretense of drying off, the boy’s pale hand on the soft spot just under Keith’s ribs. The sun was rising. The day before, someone had asked Keith was his Korean name was, and Keith had looked at them like they were stupid, exactly because they were stupid, and then had walked back to the house in Possum Kingdom wondering if that was something he should have had, if that was what was missing all along. The boy pressed a slow kiss to Keith’s neck.

 _I’m not from anywhere,_ Keith said.

*

It turns out Lance and him have being halfway through Season One of _Coffee Prince_ in common. Well, Lance is rewatching Season One. When Keith dropped out of the Garrison, he kind of dropped off the grid when it comes to things like TV dramas and talking to other people.

“This is just sad, Keith,” Lance tells him, when he says that. “Did they not have wifi out at the rodeo?”

“Y’all’d’ve never found Voltron if I’d just been sitting on my ass out there,” Keith complains. He doesn’t ask Lance to let the rodeo thing go. It’s been weeks. He’s well aware that Lance has no intention of letting the rodeo thing go.

It’s not like Keith can talk. When Lance drags him down the corridors in search of a projector, hell-bent on rigging up the Castle of Lions for a screening, Keith lets Lance loop his fingers around Keith’s wrist, easy and familiar, and tug. Keith is as helpless as if Lance’s hand is red thread. _It’s a long way down,_ but it turns out the fall itself is easy. All kinds of shit is easy, Keith knows. You just have to close your eyes.

Keith doesn’t close his eyes.

“Slumber party!” Hunk says delightedly when he rounds the corner, Pidge at his side, to find Lance digging through the controls, swearing, his hand still curled tight around Keith’s wrist. Keith’s pulse spikes. “Are you getting the others?”

For a second, Keith swears he sees something like disappointment in Lance’s eyes.

“Go ahead,” Lance says, and remembers then to let go of Keith’s wrist. Keith’s skin is burning like he’s back in a childhood August all over again. He watches Lance bite his lip, concentrating as he tries and fails to rig the controls right, and Keith feels parched just the same.

Pidge eventually gets something set up. It takes hours, long enough for Lance to give up trying to help and go fetch the others, his teeth gleaming, the inveterate party boy. At every other party Keith’s ever been to, he’s ended up slipping outside to get away from everyone, heading out the back through the knee-high reams of cornfields, past dying bonfires and half-open beers, until there was nothing but unspooling sky, the smell of sawdust, the stars.

This time, he stays where he is. He’s not entirely sure why yet. He tells himself he can see the stars just fine from here.

*

“Excuse me, ma’am,” Keith says, hesitating at the first desk he sees. The Garrison is a huge, air-conditioned complex. Keith feels sweaty, dusk-streaked and out of place. The desert hums in the back of his mind. “I’m here to register for classes.”

He passes his driver’s license over; she glances down at it, back up at him, and beams.

“What a lovely name,” she says. “And where are you from, honey?”

Keith is used to this, but he’s never quite gotten used to answering, not even after near on eighteen years. He breathes in the stale, recycled air, and thinks: one time, a boy thought my accent was from Austin, the one city I’ve never lived in. I am the smell of the strawberry festival in Poteet and the way the Pecos cantaloupes taste. I am Shakespeare in Round Top, _The Last Picture Show_ in Archer City. I am the world’s first rodeo, and one day, I think I’d like to be a throwback kid, stood in Busan like I’ve always been there.  

He breathes in again, and misses the smell of sawdust, but the desert’s settled something in his chest, so Keith smiles and says:

  
“I’m Texan, ma’am, it’s nice to meet you. Do you need me to sign for anything?”


End file.
